If you ran Google Ads for your family law firm, then the following will probably sound familiar.
You create a campaign with an ad group, target the keyword “family lawyer” on broad, make an ad, link it to your homepage, and hope for the best.
In many cases, calls do come.
The phone does ring.
In fact, often your intake gets inundated with phone calls.
That’s not the problem.
The problem is that 30 days go by, you spend $5000 and you don’t sign a single retainer.
Everyone calling was just seeking free advice on their separation or child custody issue, with little intention to actually hire your attorneys.
This is a consistent problem when it comes to Google Ads for family law firms, and there are very specific reasons why this happens.
And no, it’s not because “Google ads don’t work”.
Of course they work.
Dozens of firms in your area are spending tens of thousands of dollars per month on them, precisely because they work.
What happens is usually one of three mistakes:
The first is keyword targeting.
Family law searches run from someone comparing filing fees on a phone at midnight to a spouse with a business, an extensive property portfolio and a custody fight ahead of them.
If the campaign bids on both the same way, the cheap clicks win on volume and the high-value ones get crowded out.
The second is conversion tracking.
Most family law Google Ads accounts count every form fill and every call as a conversion.
Google’s bidding then does exactly what it was told and goes looking for more of the same low-quality inquiries.
At that point you aren’t only wasting ad spend, you’re actively training the account to find you worse leads every month!
The third is where the traffic lands.
Clicks from a divorce lawyer search get sent to a homepage, or to a page written for search engines rather than for a person in distress, and a good share of the people you paid for leave without contacting you.
Put those three together and you get the campaign most family law practices describe to us: the spend goes out, the call volume looks fine on the report, and signed matters don’t move.
Then the conclusion becomes “PPC doesn’t work for family law,” when what actually happened is that nobody qualified the traffic before it arrived.
This gets expensive fast.
Google Ads for family law firms is priced against competitors chasing the same divorce and custody cases you want, so there is no cheap version of this channel.
One contested custody matter or one high-net-worth divorce that went to the firm above you can be worth more than a quarter’s worth of your ad spend.
Other firms know this and are prepared to pay and do what it takes to get them.
You can’t throw together a quick campaign in an afternoon and hope to compete.
You need a professional who fully understands this market, what you are up against and how to get the right cases through the door in a profitable manner.
That’s what we do at Dominate Marketing.
